GridPP PMB Meeting 693

GridPP PMB Meeting 693 (14.01.19)
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Present: Dave Britton (Chair), Tony Cass, Pete Clarke, Jeremy Coles, David Colling, Alastair Dewhurst, Tony Doyle, Pete Gronbech, Roger Jones, Dave Kelsey, Steve Lloyd, Gareth Roy, Andrew Sansum, Louisa Campbell (Minutes).

Apologies: Andrew McNab, Jon Hays.

1. Hardware Planning/Problems
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DB requires input to various spreadsheets. On current estimates there are insufficient funds to meet LHC computing requirements even at Tier-1. The STFC brief was Capital £2M per annum for 4 years = £8M. Preliminary calculations require £9M for just LHC. DB confirmed GR and AD will review the figures then DB will contact STFC for guidance on how best to proceed in writing the proposal.
Aspects factored into the draft costings were discussed, including authorship fractions, Tier-1 requirements (LHC and Non-LHC) projected percentage increases (Atlas, CMS, Alice, etc) and similar for Tier-2 (4 LHC experiments). Costings (actual CPU costs since 2001 plotted and projections) for Disk and CPU. This requires to be translated into funds requiring to be spent on hardware and DB explained the rationale for assumptions built into the spreadsheet.
Tier-2 methodology differs slightly as averages are used, though it should scale, taking account of CPU and Disk existing capacity pledged and phased out as well as future requirements and costs. This provides a total projected cost of £20M compared to the proposed £8M budget. Using a straightforward 20% flat requirement apart from CPU drops the total to c. £17.5M.
STFC need to be advised and possibly a meeting called. DB noted an immediate concern over STFC potential responses – changing the brief for GridPP6 to only LHC would undermine the careful planning for proposed posts and other issues. There was some discussion on the format and rationale of the spreadsheet calculations and sanity checking. Potential concerns arise over how BAES, IRIS and CERN differences in modelling flat cash which may impact and how this should be flagged.
Decisions need to be made on how the proposal should be written regarding provision of hardware that is required regardless of the outcome, but include some potential scenarios including reduced amount of hardware only up to 2023 if insufficient funds are available. DB will write a brief explanatory document for Charlotte to review and discuss with her. DB asked members to be very responsive to GR’s requirements for information over the next few days to pin this crucial aspect of the GridPP6 proposal down.
ACTION 693.1: GR and AD will check proposed GridPP6 hardware figures.

3. AOCB
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PC mentioned changes could be made to Work Packages in the GridPP6 proposal document and suggested other PMB members could assist where necessary after DB has worked the structure and text into better shape. In the meantime PC will submit some proposed text for inclusion for WP4 and 3-4 sentence descriptions of each WP to expand on his existing 1-line summaries.

4. Standing Items
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SI-0 Bi-Weekly Report from Technical Group (DC)
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Nothing significant to report.

SI-1 ATLAS Weekly Review and Plans (RJ)
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Nothing significant to report.

SI-2 CMS Weekly Review and Plans (DC)
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Nothing significant to report.

SI-3 LHCb Weekly Review and Plans (PC)
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AM not present and no report submitted.

SI-4 Production Manager’s report (JC)
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Nothing significant to report.

SI-5 Tier-1 Manager’s Report (AD)
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– Ongoing issues with ARC CEs. Not causing significant operational issues. We have identified a large number of LHCb MCFastSimulation jobs that are probably creating the load on the system.

– On Wednesday 9th January an Echo storage node started rebooting itself and was removed from the cluster. No loss of availability to the cluster. Engineer is coming out to fix.

– Procurement. Ongoing, no news is good news right?

SI-6 LCG Management Board Report of Issues (DB)
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No MB meeting – tomorrow’s meeting has been cancelled.

SI-7 External Contexts (PC)
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High priority over the coming weeks is to capture figures into UKRI looking forward in to 2027. PC will feed in the numbers from DB’s spreadsheets.

REVIEW OF ACTIONS
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644.4: AD will progress capture of funds for Dirac with Mark Wilkinson. (Update: funding from DIRAC. AS has emailed Mark. They are now using it more heavily. Could use the money for tape, but have to be careful not to buy tape we won’t use. May be better charging later rather than during this FY? AD will now progress. 08/10/18 – Leicester are producing a PO for tapes and will send to AD to produce an invoice). Ongoing.
678.3: AD to finalise the Tier1 background document, including tape strategy by end September. (Update: Almost complete and will circulate current iteration for comment, more urgent now to feed into DB figures). Ongoing.
678.5: JC to finalise the Storage background document by end September.
(UPDATE: 17 October meeting with Tony Medland & DB and PC will attend. This is almost complete and awaiting a few minor elements to be worked in ñ GR will upload into Googledocs for info. 14.01.19 PC has updated and completed so this action is completed). Done.
690.1: DC to get confirm CMS M&O numbers and identify any mismatch due to inclusion of PhD students. (DC to follow up and provide a location where information can be extracted from). Done.
690.2: JH to follow up with BBC contacts on further potential collaboration in regards to Video Encoding proposal. Done.
692.1: RJ, DC and AM to provide information on M&O figures for GridPP6. Done.

ACTIONS AS OF 14.01.19
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644.4: AD will progress capture of funds for Dirac with Mark Wilkinson. (Update: funding from DIRAC. AS has emailed Mark. They are now using it more heavily. Could use the money for tape, but have to be careful not to buy tape we won’t use. May be better charging later rather than during this FY? AD will now progress. 08/10/18 – Leicester are producing a PO for tapes and will send to AD to produce an invoice). Ongoing.
678.3: AD to finalise the Tier1 background document, including tape strategy by end September. (Update: Almost complete and will circulate current iteration for comment, more urgent now to feed into DB figures). Ongoing.
693.1: GR and AD will check proposed GridPP6 hardware figures.